El lugar elegido por Ecologistas en Acción: playa de CalasparraEcologistas en Acción de la Región Murciana has chosen the beach of Río Segura, in its way to Calasparra, for the celebration of the Big Jump this Sunday 12th July.

Since in 1995, the naturalist Roberto Epple summoned a mass bath in different places of the river Loira to claim a better state for all European rivers, several similar acts have been taking place, but was since 2002 when the annual announcement of the Big Jump started, which bring together each year thousands of people in hundreds of European rivers asking for all the European rivers to be clean and to be a place of meeting for all again.

Big Jump is an initiative of the European Rivers Network (ERN) supported by different European organizations in which we can find Ecologistas en Acción de Región Murciana this time.

This environmental organization remind that the European Union has set the year 2015 as a date in which must had recover the good environmental state of the European rivers. This means that by that time the bathing in our river's waters must be a reality.

Pedro Luengo, coordinator of Ecologistas en Acción de Región Murciana say that “with this action we expect to catch the attention simultaneously in different European rivers on the necessity of reaching the god state of the European continental waters, as is reflected in the Water Framework Directive”. He adds, “ with the Big Jump we try to involve the citizens in the conservation of rivers by means of a recreational and a festive day with a marked determined character”.

Later he added that a bath in a river, in a greatest part of our region, it is still a utopia, as a consequence of its bad state and he quotes “ the contamination, the artificial making of its riversides or the lack of control over the extracted water that diminished considerably the flow in most of them”. He also adds that the result is that “ in the last years had been losing or seriously deteriorating numerous river beaches that have been used traditionally by citizens”.

Ecologistas en Acción de Región Murciana have chosen this year Calasparra for this claiming “dip”, in respond to “Canal de Aguas Bravas” that the consistory, together with the Tourist Consistory of Almadenes, are planning in that area.

A project that “ would not go through the bed that surrounds the Juan Vacas Island, it would be the bed of the Segura river itself, in which they would install transverse dikes to increase the water speed”, explains Ángeles Trujillo, spokeswoman of Ecologistas en Acción in Calasparra.

She adds, “They would build two huge rafts (one of those raised 7 metres over the land) that would occupy all the Island of Juan Vacas, and would need the adjacent rice-growing plots.

This would have an important environmental impact aggravated by the environmental importance of the area, as the project is located between two wetlands (Segura river and rice fields of Calasparra), and inside Natura 2000. In fact this year, the environmental organization gave one of the consolation prizes of the Atila Awards that each 5th July are made public, to the Calasparra mayor (Mr. Jesús Navarro) and to the Tourist Consistory of Almadenes.

It was the so-called “ Tontería más destacable”. The merits: the determination of both to promote unnecessary projects in natural environments of the Segura river, that are incompatibles with the good conservation of some of the areas of the Segura river that still have good environmental and landscaping condition.